Accounting for Taste

It never fails. Every time Jonathan Gold’s round and plummy tones stream out of my iPod via Santa Monica radio station KCRW’s Good Food, I find myself in an odd place for a self-satisfied San Franciscan: I long to be in Los Angeles. Eating.

As a regular on the show, Gold tantalizes me with details of a Greek burger joint where you should order the chicken, and tikin-xic at a Yucatan restaurant. If you consider that the last time I heard the show I had just gotten a less-than-palatable whiff of the ocean and yet was still tempted by Gold’s description of Hunan steamed fish heads, you can begin to comprehend his powers of persuasion.

In addition to appearing with semiregularity on Good Food, Gold pens a mouth-watering food column in the LA Weekly. Since 1986, Gold’s Counter Intelligence column has been telling people how to eat in the ethnic LA, the real LA, and on Monday, Gold won a Pulitzer Prize for it. The prize is a first for the LA Weekly and is also the first time it has been awarded to a restaurant critic.

We at CHOW also have an award to brag about. Last week, Senior Editor Lessley Anderson received the 2007 IACP Bert Greene Journalism Award for her piece “Sweet, Sour, Salty, What? The return of bitter to the American palate.”